Behind the Times — Romney arrives — Campaign 'noise'

FORMER NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR JILL ABRAMSON SAYS Fox News host Howard Kurtz took her forthcoming book,Merchants of Truth, “totally out of context” in his Wednesday report headlined, “Former NY Times editor rips Trump coverage as biased.” Kurtz, who obtained a copy of the book in advance, reported Abramson having written that the Times’s news pages under her successor, Dean Baquet, were “unmistakably anti-Trump.”

— “His article is an attempt to Foxify my book, which is full of praise for The Times and The Washington Post and their coverage of Trump,” Abramson told me in an email. Abramson, who was fired from the paper in 2014, chronicles in the book how the Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and Vice struggle in the digital era “to keep honest news alive.”

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— The former top editor also looks critically at the Times’s 2016 coverage of Hillary Clinton, citing some “bad judgment calls,” like the paper’s handling of the Steve Bannon-linked Clinton Cash. She suggests the Times overplayed Clinton’s emails, which “were not Watergate.” Abramson praises the Times's doggedness in covering Trump, and notes the president's efforts to “inflame and polarize” with his “fake news” rants. But she also suggests some Times headlines and stories "contained raw opinion."

— "I'm talking mostly about loaded headlines, analysis pieces that are full of opinion, and the sheer number of critical pieces about Trump running simultaneously in the pages of the news report as being unmistakably anti-Trump," Abramson wrote in an email. "I think that Trump deserves the tough coverage and he makes it impossible to live by [former executive editor] Abe Rosenthal's old rule about keeping the paper straight."

— A Times spokesperson told Morning Media the paper's "job is to seek the truth and hold power to account, regardless of who occupies the Oval Office." The spokesperson continued, "That is what we have done during the Trump administration, just as we did in the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations. We take pride in our long history of journalistic independence and commitment to covering the news without fear or favor.”

GOOD MORNING AND WELCOME TO MORNING MEDIA: House Speaker designate Nancy Pelosi speaks to NBC’s Savannah Guthrie this morning on “Today” as Democrats take control of the House. Daniel Lippman ([email protected]/ @dlippman) contributed to the newsletter. Subscribe. Archives.

Incoming Senator Mitt Romney appeared on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" on January 2, 2019. | POLITICO screenshot

INCOMING SEN. MITT ROMNEY’S harsh criticism of President Trump's character in the Washington Post on Tuesday night was the talk of cable news on Wednesday morning, as Media Matters notes. That afternoon, Romney sat down for more than 20 minutes with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

— "Behind the scenes, Romney was torn over whether to publish the op-ed," reports POLITICO's Alex Isenstadt. Romney "was well aware that the op-ed would ignite a media firestorm and that it would be seen as a key moment in his early Senate career," writes Isenstadt. But "as the new year neared," he adds, "Romney found himself increasingly frustrated with the president."

— Outgoing Republican Sens. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, too, grabbed headlines for criticizing Trump — evenwhile still largely backing his agenda, Romney also seems likely to support some of the president’s key policies, telling Tapper he’d vote for a border wall. Romney also suggested he doesn't plan to become a go-to Trump critic for the news media.

— “I don’t intend to be a daily commentator, to be someone who stops every evening in the hall of the Senate and looks for the nearest camera, says what I think about the president’s tweet or the fault of the day,” Romney told Tapper. “But if there’s a matter of great significance, I’ll speak out on that.”

President Donald Trump talks to journalists for more than an hour and a half during a meeting of his Cabinet in the Cabinet Room at the White House January 02, 2019 in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

"I THINK WHAT WE SAW RIGHT THERE was the stream of a consciousness from a man who hasn’t talked to anybody in a few weeks and has been trying to rebuff a number of pretty negative headlines against him, NBC’s Katy Tur said after cutting away from Trump’s rambling, 90-minute-plus Cabinet meeting before cameras.

TRUMP’S HOLLOW CRIES OF ‘FAKE NEWS’: The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan writes that the reporting Trump “criticizes as false — he claims it is invented from sources that don’t exist — is validated when top officials leave the White House staff and give on-the-record interviews,” such as former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and chief of staff John Kelly, who spoke candidly to the Los Angeles Times upon exiting the White House.

COVERING ELIZABETH WARREN: The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart suggests the news media is missing the best explanation as to why Sen. Elizabeth Warren “attracts disproportionate conservative criticism, and has disproportionately high disapproval ratings.” Beinart writes that it “has nothing to do with her progressive economic views or her dalliance with DNA testing,” but “that she’s a woman.”

— CJR’s Jon Allsop also took issue with some early Warren 2020 coverage, including from POLITICO. “Warren’s candidacy, in particular, recalls some familiar pitfalls for the press: for ‘Hillary’s emails’ see ‘DNA test,’ for ‘crooked Hillary’ see ‘Pocahontas,’ for ‘cold and unlikable’ see ‘cold and unlikable,’” he writes.

— And Warren began fundraising on Wednesday night off a POLITICO story titled "Warren battles the ghosts of Hillary," The Washington Post's Erik Wemple reports. POLITICO stood by the reporting, with a spokesperson telling Wemple the story "directly acknowledges that this criticism is viewed by many within the Democratic Party as unfair, if not sexist."

MSNBC HOST URGES TURNING DOWN THE 'NOISE' IN 2020: "It is our job — all of our job — to do better this time around," MSNBC host Chris Hayes said on Wednesday night's show in discussing campaign coverage. What should count most for the news media and public, he said, is a candidate's worldview, platform, how they've conducted themselves, and "what we can best find out about their mettle and their judgment."

— "Who will they fight for, what will they fight for? Can they be trusted to do what they say?" Hayes continued. "Everything else is noise. And trust me, there will be an awful lot of noise in the next 22 months."

Revolving Door

David Byler, most recently chief elections analyst and a staff writer at The Weekly Standard, is joining the Washington Post Opinions staff as a data analyst and political columnist.

Peter Bohan has left Reuters after 35 years, where he most recently served as executive director of the Reuters America news service. Bohan started in 1983 as a commodities reporter in Chicago and also worked in Hong King and Singapore before returning to Chicago.

Kylie Atwood, most recently a CBS News State Department reporter, is joining CNN’s national security team as a reporter.

Jackie DeAngelis, who spent the past 13 years at CNBC, is joining Yahoo Finance as an anchor.

Griff Witte, who joined the Washington Post in 2003 and has most recently worked on the Foreign desk, is joining the National staff, focusing on “how the changing nature of Washington is affecting government decision-making across the country and placing strains on democratic norms.”

OPENINGS: The Washington Post is adding two new national correspondents: “one in the American heartland to cover the region’s changing economy and politics, and one in South Texas to focus on the border and immigration.”

ENTER: The 2019 Deadline Club Awards are now accepting entries, through Feb. 8. The Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, sponsored by the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, is accepting applications through Jan. 21.

Extras

— Fox News was the "most-watched network on cable for the third straight year," TVNewser's A.J. Katz reports.

— For CJR, Robert Baird profiles Bhaskar Sunkara, who founded socialist magazine Jacobin in 2010 at just 21 years old.

—MuckRock’s Emma Best looks back at how the FBI investigated the Village Voice and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press for espionage in 1976.

— The Washington Post’s Tim Carman explains why his column will no longer be “$20 Diner.”

— New York Times Crossword editor Will Shortz apologizes for a “slur” appearing in Tuesday’s puzzle.

— "NBC Nightly News" anchor Lester Holt and son Stefan, an anchor at New York’s WNBC, speak to New York Family magazine.

Kicker

“In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think — like everyone else does — that we miss so much. People who don’t understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it’s corporate control or even worse, that it’s partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country, then they are right.” — Veteran journalist William Arkin announcing his departure from NBC

About The Author : Michael Calderone

Michael Calderone is the senior media reporter for POLITICO and writes the Morning Media newsletter. He previously covered the press and politics for Huffington Post, Yahoo, and The New York Observer, and has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and NPR. Calderone is an adjunct professor at New York University and served as a Ferris visiting journalism professor at Princeton University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Miriam and son Noam.